


more than his armour

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: who's watching your back? [1]
Category: AUSTEN Jane - Works, Persuasion - Jane Austen, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Amputation, Clone Wars, Estrangement, F/M, Jedi, Jedi Code, Mandalorian, Minor Character Death, Order 66, Post-Order 66, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Reunited and It Feels So Good, Tumblr Prompt, and post-relationship in an odd sort of way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-02 07:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18806416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Verd ori'shya beskar'gam: a warrior is more than his armour. And Worth doesn't need his enigmatic ex-Jedi commander at all.





	more than his armour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SecondStarOnTheLeft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/gifts).



> Written for SecondStarontheLeft, who prompted me Jedi Anne.

Worth’s serial number was CT-3765, and he had nearly been culled on repeated occasions as a child a) for talking back, b) for being, in the Kaminoans’ view, overly solicitous of brothers with what they deemed weaknesses, and c) for displaying genetic abnormalities, which was to say he was blond and he didn’t like them. Discipline he did fine with, but the Kaminoans looked at him and his brothers in a way that had always made his hackles rise: weighed and found wanting.

 

The Cuy’val Dar, unforgiving of weakness but appreciative of CT-3765’s boldness and competence, told the Kaminoans he was worth the inconvenience so often that he looked up the word on the holonet, decided he liked its connotations, took it and made it his name.

 

“You might just as well have called yourself Worthy,” complained Harvil, whose name had been picked for him after an unfortunate incident involving a training salle and a horde of genetically engineered harvil bees, and who was consequently salty about everyone who got to their name first, except Fani. Fani’s name was her own, no questions asked, and she’d never explained where it came from.

 

“I’m not _di’kutla_ ,” Worth retorted.

 

“Will you _shut up,_ both of you,” said Benic, who was reading the last book of poetry he’d see until their pretty dark-eyed new Commander handed him one after the battle that ripped the heart out of the 304th and left Worth, CT or not, occupying a Clone Commander’s position.

 

Anne, she called herself, Anne Elliot, and she was a seventeen-year-old padawan, and her master was General Russell, and she smiled at Worth like she thought his name was real. Like he _had_ worth. Like he was worth it. It had been a child’s declaration, full of bravado, made when he was less than six cycles old. Anne looked at him, and she made it real.

 

She had a turn for healing, a gift from the MediCorps mother she had seen only intermittently as a child, and she sat in the medical bay and meditated with her soldiers while General Russell had their old general court-martialled, and Worth didn’t think he was imagining things when he felt lighter and more comfortable in her presence. He also didn’t think he was underestimating matters when he thought the 304th would probably die for her by the time the first month was out, duty or not. She treated them like they _all_ had worth, which was how Benic came to have a padd with poetry on it, and Harvil came to have extra physiotherapy for his replaced leg, and Fani came to have paint for her shiny replacement armour.

 

Worth had a terrible concussion, legacy of the explosion that had destroyed Harvil’s leg and sent Worth himself flying. She sat next to him with a cool hand on his forehead and talked softly while their ship limped all the way back to Coruscant. Once there - once Harvil was on his feet (one prosthetic, one original issue), once Fani had repainted her armour and dented it a bit, once Benic had sworn undying love for and then got over Anne - General Russell took their old general to the Jedi courts and instructed Anne to merge their new regiment with the old and get them both into shape.

 

If it was difficult, Anne never showed it, except in the way she always made time to sit with Worth, even if only for a few minutes, at the end of the day. She recommended him music and taught him to meditate like a Jedi, and he discovered that she barely knew how to fight without her lightsaber – General Russell had never planned to go anywhere near a battlefield, so the last year had been a bit of a shock – and made her learn. She was a quick study, and a good shot, almost too good, and she was easy to talk to. Almost too easy.

 

For two years, Worth followed her and General Russell around the galaxy, shrugging off Harvil’s comments and Fani’s knowing eyes, picking up fragments of information about Anne like pieces of gold. Her love of music, her interest in healing. Her human mother, who had not wanted a Jedi’s path, and who had had three Force-sensitive daughters by three male sentients: Elizabeth, full human, two years older, approaching knighthood, Anne, half-Tholothian, likewise a padawan, and Mary, half-Twi’lek, who had not wanted to become a knight either but hadn’t known what she did want and had chosen to join her father’s family at fourteen.

 

Elizabeth sneered a lot. Her master, another Elliot (“no relation,” Anne said, and Worth could believe it; firstly, General Elliot was three-quarters Zabrak, and secondly, he was both vain and arrogant) never even looked twice at the clones, except to note that they were aesthetically acceptable. Mary, Worth had never met, and didn’t see why he would.

 

Anne, Worth was in love with, and by the time two years minus three days were up, he was sure Anne loved him too. Two years minus two days, she kissed him, and he thought his heart was going to burst with joy, and two years minus one day she wouldn’t even look at him and he was furious, and two years made it Order 66.    

 

Order 66, and Anne fled without looking back, even as he called to her, scared for himself and terrified for her and desperate to prove that whatever madness had afflicted his _vod’e_ hadn’t touched him. But she left, and Harvil grabbed him and told him that whatever this boded it didn’t bode well, and they both grabbed Benic and Fani and a shuttle and got the fuck out of there. Harvil set a course for anywhere else. Worth sedated Benic and Fani and sat with his resentment that Anne had set him aside like he wasn’t worth anything.

  
Well, fuck it all, then. _Verd ori'shya beskar'gam._

 

The next eight years were not good ones. Worth thought about Anne often, especially when the Empire trumpeted their Jedi kills, and tried not to think about her at all. Her name was never on any of their lists, and that made him sick with relief.

 

He and Harvil got the chips out of Benic and Fani’s heads early on. The concussive wave that had fucked up Worth’s head temporarily and Harvil’s leg forever had also deactivated their chips, but Benic’s and Fani’s had been live, and it was hard going to keep either of them from eating their blasters when they found out what they’d done. It was even harder going to keep away from the Empire, which had no truck with runaway clones. At first they’d fought to stay together, but then Fani had been killed in a chance encounter on a backwater planet with brothers who might even have been 304th, and Harvil and Worth had given up on that. Benic had almost given up on living, and Harvil’s prosthetic leg was getting increasingly shit with the years and lack of credits for maintenance, so they went to the Rebel Alliance and made a deal involving a genefix, and once the fucked-up fever from that had abated the Alliance took Benic and Harvil for intelligence analysts and weapons trainers on a quiet planet with some nice seaside towns. And then it sent Worth for a briefing with some rough-looking sentients who called themselves the Pathfinders.

 

They weren’t brothers, and many of them had once been Seppies, and consequently treated Worth with suspicion bordering on hatred. But they were all warriors, and Worth knew how to prove himself to people like that. He felt like he’d always known. Some of them were all right; Sofie, for instance, and her flyboy boyfriend Croft. Others he could live with, like the useless Dick, who was mostly very good for blowing up things that needed to explode and sometimes very bad for blowing things up that didn’t. None of it meant all that much.

 

No, it wasn’t a good eight years.

 

He didn’t think it was looking up when he met Anne on Lyme. His first thought was that she was alive; his second, automatically cataloguing his former Commander’s movements, that she was exhausted. His third was that he was supposed to be angry with her for leaving him behind even before she’d fled, for acting like the love between them meant nothing. But eight years and a lot of dead bodies and he’d kind of forgotten how most of that had felt. It all paled into insignificance compared with everything else that had come to pass.

 

“I’m going for a walk on the beach,” Anne said very softly, even quieter than she had been as a young padawan, and left.

 

“Don’t fuck this up,” Harvil recommended to Worth, before he followed her.

 

They walked in silence down towards the cliffs. The sky was grey, the sea a weirdly vibrant shade of green that Worth was never going to get used to, and it was coming on to rain. Once they’d talked together like they were sharing an invisible line between their minds, a radio channel meant for no-one else, and now there was only silence between them.

 

Anne stopped at the edge of the sea and Worth stopped next to her.

 

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For leaving without you. I didn’t realise you were unchipped.”

  
  
“Are you sorry for kissing me and ditching me?” Worth enquired, and immediately wished he could remove his own tongue and take back the last ten seconds. But Anne hesitated, tellingly, and Worth stared into her face like those dark eyes were going to tell him her secrets.

 

“I was a Jedi,” Anne said at last. “We’re not supposed to get attached.”

 

Worth stored the implications of this sentence away for later consideration, and then caught himself up on one of them. “ _Was_?”

 

Anne looked out at the horizon and didn’t reply. The rain was actually starting now, not just threatening, spitting sharp little pinpricks on exposed skin.

 

“As I said,” Anne answered, eventually. “We’re not supposed to get attached.”

 

“ _Anne_ ,” Worth said, wrapped up in a peculiar mixture of exasperation and hope and affection and severe irritation, and then blue lightning traced itself over distant clouds and Anne flinched and shuddered, all her tendrils curling in reflexive terror and her soft brown skin suddenly ashen with some remembered pain. Worth forgot about his own feelings, and half-carried her back to the safe house, where Harvil and his sharp, welcoming Twi’lek wife fussed over her almost incessantly and Benic threatened her with a poetry recital.

 

Worth took a seat in the chair next to the squashy armchair they’d stuffed her into, and laid his blaster on a side table and stretched out his legs so she could see the knife rig strapped to one ankle, peeking from below the hem of his trousers. _Nothing's getting past me_ , the old Anne would have known he meant to say.

 

Anne half-smiled.

 

“What happened to you?” Worth said. “With lightning? Accident?”

 

The smile fell off her face, and she scraped her teeth hard over her bottom lip. “It wasn’t an accident.”

 

Worth crushed the impractical impulse to go out, find whoever was responsible, and murder them. He laid his hand, palm up, on the arm of her chair, and tried not to shiver when – after a second’s pause – she took it. She didn’t say anything; he was beginning to understand that he shouldn’t expect her to. Anne had always been soft-spoken, but this new, older Anne needed a long time to get around to words.

 

“Elizabeth,” she said at last. “It was Elizabeth.” Another long pause. “I can’t blame her. It’s all too easy to Fall, these days. And the Emperor has… ways. Of changing people and things.”

 

“Elizabeth,” Worth repeated, stunned. “Your _sister_.”

 

“She doesn’t call herself that any more,” Anne said, which wasn’t an answer.

 

“Where were your team?” Worth demanded, storing that up for later questioning, supposing he had the chance. “Your back-up?”

 

“Associating with a former Jedi is extremely dangerous,” Anne said wearily. “I can’t do that to anyone.”

 

“Eight years is a long time to be alone!”

 

“Well, you would know, wouldn’t you?” Anne said, and Worth felt all the air rush out of his lungs. “Neither of us can exactly throw stones at the other.” She loosened her hand, as if she expected him to let go.

 

Worth gripped tighter. “No,” he said. “No.”

 

There was a very long silence.

  
“I’m sorry I left without you,” Anne said.

 

“I’m sorry I hated you for it,” Worth said.

 

The air felt clearer. Easier. There was the faintest smile on Anne’s face.

 

Worth hoped like fuck that Harvil and Benic weren’t listening in.

 

He squeezed her hand gently. “Eight years is a long time,” he said. “Doesn’t have to be nine.”

 

“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” Anne said, which was both a deflection and an admission that she’d be there in the morning, which suddenly seemed not so far away.

 

“You should get some rest,” Worth said, and helped her upstairs to the cot Benic had put together for her like they did this often, which made him wonder how often Benic and Harvil had seen her and just not said anything to him, the _chakaariin_. She took some kind of medication Benic gave her, which only added to Worth’s questions, and then he went downstairs, back to the sofa and the blankets an unsympathetic Harvil had dumped there.

 

He wondered what had happened to Anne, in the last eight years, and if she still liked to swim. He wondered if she had branching scars to match her fear of lightning, and if she still argued with Benic about poetry. He wondered if she healed or taught or fought or all of the above, and he wondered if there was a place for a clone Pathfinder to accompany her down whichever path she had taken, and if she would let him anyway.

 

Most of all, he wondered what it meant when she said that Jedi weren’t supposed to get attached, and that she was no longer a Jedi.

 

 Worth slept very badly.


End file.
